The Washington Post’s robot reporter has published 850 articles in the past year

It’s been a year since The Washington Post started using its homegrown artificial intelligence technology, Heliograf, to spit out around 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics. Since then, it’s used Heliograf to cover congressional and gubernatorial races on Election Day and D.C.-area high school football games.

In its first year, the Post has produced around 850 articles using Heliograf. That included 500 articles around the election that generated more than 500,000 clicks — not a ton in the scheme of things, but most of these were stories the Post wasn’t going to dedicate staff to anyway.

Media outlets using AI say it’s meant to enable journalists to do more high-value work, not take their jobs. The AP estimated that it’s freed up 20 percent of reporters’ time spent covering corporate earnings and that AI is also moving the needle on accuracy.